The Book of Love.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s first novel, coming nine years after her third short story collection Get In Trouble was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a rarity for genre fiction of any sort. This novel, following a quartet of teenagers after three of them end up accidentally dead and are purposely brought back to life by a demon of questionable intent, is a damn masterpiece.

The novel opens with Susannah mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her sister, Laura, and two of Laura’s friends, Daniel – Susannah’s putative boyfriend – and Mo, a year earlier. But it turns out they were just mostly dead, and in the second chapter, we meet the three of them, plus a fourth character, as the guy they thought was their boring music teacher Mr. Anabin reveals he’s brought them back from the death place, and that he’ll give them another chance at life, altering everyone else’s memories so they think the trio were just away on a study-abroad program in Ireland. It turns out that this is part of a more complex deal between Mr. Anabin and another demon (or whatever he is) named Bogomil, whose history is longer and more complicated than anyone imagined. We follow the four as they try to figure out how to fulfill Mr. Anabin’s requests so they can stay alive while also navigating their relationships with each other, with people in their New England town of Lovesend, with a new visitor or two, and with an all-powerful evil entity who would like nothing better than to just eat them all up.

Link builds the world of this book piecemeal, giving us hints as we go along as to what lies just beyond the ‘door’ through which the three friends passed, even holding off on introducing or explaining some key characters until well into the narrative. It adds to the book’s dreamlike atmosphere, which itself connects to Susannah’s dreams about Bogomil and the way Mr. Anabin and later other characters play with sense and memory, while also keeping the reader from becoming too omniscient, so we can better feel the confusion of the troika as they seek to understand their situation and their changing abilities.

The book overflows with interesting characters, highlighted by the fantastic four at the heart. Susannah and Laura are sisters, opposites in nearly every way, but believable and fleshed-out, even more than the two boys. Daniel’s a bit of a goof, a well-meaning one, the guy who drifts through life while good things happen to him; while Mo is a more tragic figure who hates Daniel for exactly that reason. The way the four interact, with fights and tiffs and real moments of emotion, may be the greatest strength in a book that is as strong as any I’ve read in a year.

The story meanders at times, yet it never feels padded and certainly doesn’t slow down for anything or anyone; the final quarter or so seems to move at top speed, as the trio figure out some things about their predicament and the various competing forces lock Lovesend under a spell that may end in the destruction of the entire town. I don’t know if Link entirely stuck the landing here; it’s imperfect, but not bad by any means, just perhaps a little too tidy, where everyone gets some variation of a happy ending – or at least not a sad or tragic one. The denouement with the final boss is also of debatable quality; it works, barely, but again relies on a little hand-waving that this is all just fine and go with it. And I did go with it, to be clear.

If you like the work of Neil Gaiman, which I always have, but are looking for similar literature by any other author for obvious reasons, this is the most Gaimanesque novel I’ve ever read. It has dark, creepy elements, and it sits on both sides of the divide between life and death, with flawed main characters and demons from the benevolent to the purely evil. It has the feeling of an impossible story, that no one should be able to write this well, with prose this clear and clever, with characters this three-dimensional, and with a story that nearly sets the pages on fire as you progress. It’s on the list of finalists for this year’s Nebula Award, and I have no idea how the Hugos whiffed on it. The Book of Love is a marvel.

Next up: Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning novel Rite of Passage.

A Sorceress Comes to Call.

T. Kingfisher won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle and Bone, a dark fantasy novel with an indelible main character and outstanding prose, using the fantasy trappings in the setting rather than relying on them to drive the plot (or in lieu of one). Her latest novel, A Sorceress Comes to Call, has been nominated for this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it features more compelling characters and strong writing, although this time around Kingfisher leans more into the magic aspects of the story and it’s not always to the book’s benefit.

Cordelia is a 14-year-old girl who lives with her mother, Evangeline, a sorceress and a generally awful human, a clear Mother Gothel figure who uses her powers to leech money from men and to keep Cordelia in line – making her Obedient, where Evangeline can completely control Cordelia’s every action and word, while Cordelia is locked in and able to see everything that she’s doing and saying. Evangeline’s most recent “benefactor” appears to be done with her, so she takes her vengeance and sets off in search of new prey. She ends up ensnaring the Squire, whose sister, Hester, sees right away that Evangeline is bad news – referring to the woman as Doom in her thoughts – and eventually realizes that Cordelia is her mother’s prisoner, not her accomplice. The two must work together to try to stop Evangeline from marrying the Squire and casting Hester and all the servants out, and at the same time to free Cordelia from bondage, while, of course, Evangeline is not one to take opposition lightly and lashes out in violent ways.

Kingfisher is a hell of a storyteller; even when Sorceress started to veer more into using magic to resolve major plot points, she never lets her foot off the gas, and almost every plot twist is both well-earned and ratchets up the tension significantly. Cordelia’s a little bit of a cipher as a character because she’s so beaten down by her mother’s iron grip that she hasn’t had a chance to develop much as a person, so Hester ends up the real heroine, and she’s a star. She needs her own series of mysteries or something similar, because she’s rich and complex, smart but not unreasonably so, a little funny, a lot self-deprecating, and torn between her romantic inclinations and her fierce desire to maintain her independence. This becomes her story more than Cordelia’s by her force of personality, and watching her think and work through the problem of Doom is every bit as compelling as reading a classic Agatha Christie novel.

Where Sorceress loses a little bit relative to Nettle and Bone is in how much it relies on magic to resolve the major conflicts of the story, and how Kingfisher does so. After one of the big plot twists, an entirely new paranormal thing happens that hadn’t been introduced or even implied previously in the story, and it is critical in the ultimate plan to defeat Doom forever. That plan also requires the use of a ritual that doesn’t rely enough on the ingenuity or strength of the characters; they just have to get Doom in the right place and say some words and poof, which reminded me of that insipid show Charmed. That ritual follows a long stretch of time within the book where Hester, Cordelia, and some of their allies spend days poring through books looking for the solution, which is the only part of the book where the plot slows down.

Kingfisher does eventually stick the landing here once you get past the magical hand-waving that gets us to the climactic battle, with an incredibly tense series of scenes through the fight itself and a balanced epilogue that treats both of the protagonists fairly and in ways that are true to their characters. I’m hoping we see Hester again somewhere, as she’s a marvelous creation and too good to waste on just a single book. Kingfisher has said in interviews that she was inspired to write this by reading Regency romances, so perhaps she’ll decide to continue in that vein and bring Hester back for another go.

Next up: I’ve just finished Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and begun Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, the latter the winner of the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel.